Is There An Artificial God? - <AUTHOR> http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

<comment><USER4> The best part is at the end:

"But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn't have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It's communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. Eventually he figured out, 'Hang on, there's a chip in there and I'm on a computer and there's a network running around the building, so why don't I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I'm going to have a wasted journey or not?' So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet - so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine. Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn't just say, 'The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty' but had all sorts of information; it said, 'There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that'. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, 'bang!' - there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? - well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away! Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from 5,000 miles away you can reach into a University corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can but it's the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand. "

</comment><comment><USER5> DA was a genius comic writer but I think he is never remembered for real intelligence too. For example:

 _Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world._ #

That's the kind of thoughtful insight that just doesn't occur to many.

<comment><USER6> This is the tragedy of a lot of science fiction writers, many of whom are incredibly bright and often better with nonfiction than they are with their writing.

DA's fiction is good, but not particularly special. His style's a bit amateur. On the other hand, his nonfiction from Salmon of Doubt is surprisingly excellent.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Salmon of Doubt pretty much changed my life when I read it at ~15. This speech was included in it. I find myself frequently referring to it in forum topics on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. [...] I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's ( [...] irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'._

In what way is it irrational? I think the author conflates apparent lack of support with irrationality - the reason one shouldn't do the switch is that it is a type of work, it requires effort that would otherwise not be expended, Jewish scripture does not allow work on Saturdays, Rabbi's confirm that this is work. Rabbi's are inspired by God, God created us and inspired scripture and knows what is best.

Now we can pick all sorts of holes in that argument on lack of support. But it is a rational argument, it applies known (to the subject) facts in a logical manner to determine the true course to take.

You might argue that the premises are wrong, fine, but that doesn't stop the reasoning from being logical - if I tell you I'm wearing a green hat, then I ask you what colour of hat I'm wearing, you say green; but I'm not wearing a hat, that doesn't make you irrational it just makes you wrong.

The question of whether God exists is not a scientific question, so a better premise to attack would be that Rabbi's are inspired by God. "Rabbi's provide bad advice" might be a good first hypothesis - eventually we see that Rabbi's usually provide good advice, should we take that advice? Seems logical (within this limited discourse). Now that doesn't prove the premise we held true initially but it gives limited support to it and is of itself a good reason for listening to Rabbi's.

So, then we might consider why we are protective of the Jews belief that they shouldn't switch the light on Saturday. Well do we have scientific data which somehow shows his premises to be wrong? Financial data is relatively simple - did the pundits shares go up, etc.? I warrant that the reason we protect beliefs that we ourselves consider wrong (or in the authors case irrational (which I think is wrong!)) is because we don't have clear data. We _belive_ they are wrong but can't readily show they are objectively wrong.

If one could flip to a "metaphysical indicators" page of the newspaper (! assuming we know its true) and look up "God: God is impersonal and does not require one to abide by any specific framework of laws except the Golden Rule" then we'd have a certain fact that we could rely on to demonstrate the falsehood of this Jews position.

<comment><USER6> _In what way is it irrational?_

The fact that it relies on an absurd belief.

 _Rabbi's are inspired by God, God created us and inspired scripture and knows what is best._

Yeah. That's the irrational part.

 _But it is a rational argument, it applies known (to the subject) facts in a logical manner to determine the true course to take._

"God told us to" isn't logic unless God is first proven.

 _The question of whether God exists is not a scientific question_

Yes it is. If God exists, there should be a proof for it. If there is no proof, then there is no God.

 _"Rabbi's provide bad advice" might be a good first hypothesis - <USER2> we see that Rabbi's usually provide good advice, should we take that advice? Seems logical (within this limited discourse)._

That's a non sequitur. If a rabbi (not a proper noun, by the way) provides good advice, that proves that the rabbi as a human being is wise regarding certain things. I can give terrific personal advice and still not be good at playing the stock market.

 _Well do we have scientific data which somehow shows his premises to be wrong?_

You're invoking Sagan's dragon. The burden of proof is on you, not on reality. Until you prove it _right_ , you are wrong and have no argument to make.

 _We belive they are wrong but can't readily show they are objectively wrong._

But we can.

<comment><USER8> _"God told us to" isn't logic unless God is first proven._

Not really. This, for example, is a perfectly logical argument:

      All burritos are Platonists.
      Batman is a burrito.
      Therefore, Batman is a Platonist.

It does not require either of the premises to be proven (or even true, or even semantically meaningful) to be rational.

To be _reasonable_ , on the other hand, is a much fuzzier concept.

 _You're invoking Sagan's dragon. The burden of proof is on you, not on reality. Until you prove it right, you are wrong and have no argument to make._

"Burden of proof" has no real connection to rationality as such (beyond determining whether the logic itself is valid). It is fundamental to the scientific method, but that's another thing altogether.

<comment><USER9> You are using terms in a loose and nontraditional way.

The argument isn't logical so much as it is valid. It isn't sound, based on the untrue premises, but it preserves the truth of the premises.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundness>

Occam's razor provides a reasonable metric for burden of proof. Any position that requires Saturday to have a special property that affects light switches is obviously more complicated than the null hypothesis that light switches are agnostic with respect to the day of the week. The valid arguments in favor of a special Saturday are not terribly satisfiable (in a technical sense), and are thus unfavored.

<comment><USER7> A series of statements that are valid are logical. The conclusions can be wrong, as "anything follows from a false premise" (about the only actual statement I recall from logic lectures; see eg <http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/implication.html>).

Occam's Razor is unsound. The truth is not necessarily simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank you so much for posting this. I had heard bits and pieces of it quoted, but didn't know from whence. What an utterly astoundingly deeply brilliant mind. So nice that there is audio to go with it.

</comment><comment><USER11>
       God != Religion

<comment><USER12> I've always gone for the prescription that Faith and Religion are two separate but entwined beasts. Faith is the emotion that is shaped and controlled by the political/social/cultural construct of Religion. I find it insulting that this is so often disregarded by learned speakers such as Richard Dawkins.

I'm looking forward to giving this a thorough read, I always loved DA and his method of communicating some deeply philosophical and scientific ideas with the right amount of scepticism and curiosity to make something uniquely human of it. As Boris Pasternak would say, DA incorporates his knowledge in Myth - <USER3> master storyteller.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/god/-/base/argumentmaps>

<comment><USER5> DA is not actually discussing the idea of an actual god - i.e. a deity.

The thrust of the speech is about the idea that some of the crazy notions humans come up with might have sound basis in facts we are only subconsciously aware of (he has a couple of excellent examples).

The point being that we should be careful to dismiss it as unscientific bunk without at least bearing it in mind in the future :)</comment></comment>


China and India lead in greening of the world through land-use management - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0220-7 <comment><USER2> That's deceptive.

China is off-loading coal and building it in other countries. It's despicable

[https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china- placin...](https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/716347646/why-is-china-placing-a- global-bet-on-coal?t=1566247339933)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand, part of this greening is through more agriculture, which probably means more energy use to till, irrigate and fertilize these fields. Is this on net more or less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?</comment>


The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015: Takaaki Kajita And Arthur B. McDonald - <AUTHOR> http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/10/06/nobel-prize-physics-idINKCN0S00ZZ20151006 <comment><USER2> I worked on SNO for my masters, helping to build the water purification systems. The goal was one atom of impurity per cubic metre of water. It made distilled water look filthy. :)

Everyone knew that if we got it to work, Arthur would win the Nobel Prize. He worked _very_ hard on it, and was a good leader.

Congratulations to him.

<comment><USER3> Maybe I'm confused, but it seems like he won the prize for completely unrelated work. Does the prize committee award it for the full lifetime work and simply pick one nominal project to credit, or has Arthur McDonald simply done _two_ Nobel-worthy projects in his lifetime?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/201...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/press.html)

"for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass"

Which indicates that he won it for work resulting from the SNO experiment.

<comment><USER3> Wait, so the water purification project led to the discovery that neutrinos have mass?

EDIT: Oh okay, I get it now. The project wasn't about building water purification systems, they just needed really really pure water to run particle-related experiments. Got it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Technical document explaining the scientific background here: [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/201...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/advanced- physicsprize2015.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't wait to see laureates' Nobel Lectures. Each year laureates give a down to earth lecture about their findings - how they started, how they found the results, what motivated them to work on these problems, etc. Very interesting to see laureates explain this themselves.

Click on the laureate names, then choose "Nobel Lecture" to watch the videos.

For example,

[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/201...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/higgs- lecture.html)

For Higg's lecture a few years ago, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_oscillation)

Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon whereby a neutrino created with a specific lepton flavor (electron, muon or tau) can later be measured to have a different flavor. The probability of measuring a particular flavor for a neutrino varies periodically as it propagates through space.

First predicted by Bruno Pontecorvo in 1957,[2] neutrino oscillation has since been observed by a multitude of experiments in several different contexts. Also, it turned out to be the resolution to the long-standing solar neutrino problem.

Neutrino oscillation is of great theoretical and experimental interest, since observation of the phenomenon implies that the neutrino has a non-zero mass, which was not included as part of the original Standard Model of particle physics.

</comment><comment><USER7> Quote from the embedded video:

> In order to do this we had to build a detector the size of a 10 story > building, 2 kilometers underground. In a mine, Creighton Mine, near Sudbury, > Ontario... and we had the advantage of a thousand tonnes [of heavy water] on > loan from Canada's reserves of heavy water. The value of which was on the > order of 300 million dollars. We used that for about 10 years, measuring > neutrinos roughly 1 [per] hour. By having this very sensitive detector we > were able to make measurements that others could not. But it took [a] > team... on the order of 150 people to accomplish this scientific > measurement.

Pretty astounding work, if you ask me. The dedication of these people should be applauded.

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems to be awards for two neutrino observatories, Super-Kamiokande and SNO(Sudbury Neutrino Observatory). Note that the Nobel Prize in Physics 2002 was also awarded to neutrino observations.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it fair to give the Nobel prize to a single/two persons in 2015? Usually it is a team of people all working together collectively to solve a common problem.

<comment><USER10> I was actually involved with the experimental setup at SNO, however tiny in the grand scheme.

Btw, my contribution was in the front end particle detectors, when I was an undergraduate student. This was 20 yrs ago so a bit fuzzy on he details. But basically, people on my team (University of Pennsylvania high energy physics dept) designed analog ASIC's that effectively connected directly to the SNO photomultiplier tube outputs to process the tiny electrical signals, IIRC often from only a few hundred or thousand electrons. There were two chips they designed. An integrator (SNOINT) which was like a preamp and identified how strong the signal was, and a discriminator (SNOD) which identified accurate timing information of the pulses.

We required IIRC about 10,000 of these chips, and the fabrication process had a very low yield (about 30% had all functionality working). So my job entailed setting up an automated test station, simulating all functionality of the photomultiplier inputs, and interfacing with a computer to run the suite of tests and identify good/bad in about 30-60s. We had a good process and hired a bunch of part-time workers who would run through the tests to identify the good chips.

I was quite jealous of some of my colleagues who worked with the actual production circuit boards, and got to travel to SNO itself and go down into the mine to set them up in production.

Fun times though. We also built Fermilab and CERN detector electronics, and even for the cancelled superconducting supercollider. That job basically taught me electronics and data acquisition, and led to my next job as a joint hardware/software engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there an easy explanation for why the oscillation implies mass?

<comment><USER12> You need to know two facts:

1) A massless object will travel at the speed of light. A massive object, on the other hand, as long as it may accelerate, will always travel at smaller speeds.

2) When you are travelling at the speed of light you don't experience time, it is completely frozen. If you could ride a photon time would freeze. This is the notion of proper time, in physicists' terms. Think of the twins paradox, it's similar, albeit not identical...

So if a neutrino were massless, as predicted by the Standard Model, it wouldn't experience time and it wouldn't oscillate. Oscillating requires time.

It follows that, as oscillations are observed, the neutrino must experience time, and have a mass.

This mass is quite tiny, we don't know its value, we just know upper bounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would love someone to do an ELI5 of their research.

<comment><USER14> Here's the official ELI5 (or ELI12, which is probably what you really want):

[http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/201...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/popular- physicsprize2015.pdf)

edit: and here is the official ELIAPhysicsGradStudent: [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/201...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/advanced- physicsprize2015.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I probably will get down-voted for my ignorance, but is this as meaning-less as the Nobel Peace Prize?

</comment><comment><USER16> We changed the URL from [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/201...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/index.html) to one that gives some background.

</comment><comment><USER17> OT: In spanish Kajita sounds like Cajita (little box), so there's a joke about this being a PR campaing of McDonalds.

Also Kajita should be happy because of this achievement :P

<comment><USER18> Well, it _looks_ like it should sound like "cajita", as in "cajita feliz" ("happy meal"), but actually his name is pronounced [kadʒita], not [kaxita]; think "callita", like a small digging stick, but pronounced with a Rioplatense accent. Japanese transliteration is misleading in Spanish!

(You could kind of make the same complaint about pronouncing "tomato" as [tə'meɪɾoʊ], since the second vowel in the Nahuatl word is very clearly [a], but I think you can make a reasonable case that "tomato" is an English word with several centuries of history whose pronunciation has simply changed, while Kajita is not a Spanish word, but rather the name of a Japanese guy who's in fact not even dead yet. So if you pronounce it [kaxita], you're just mispronouncing it, that's all.)</comment></comment>


Systems Programming at Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://monkey.org/~marius/talks/twittersystems/#1

<comment><USER2> In the past programmers associated with the term "systems programming" stuff like kernel development and hardware control. Today it seems to be used more often for concurrent network service software programming.</comment>


Ask HN: Is work worth leaving College for? - <AUTHOR> I'm a 19 year old Freelance web developer. I've been at it for the last couple of years and have a decent number of clients and billings. Enough to pay for college, support me and help out with the family. I started learning to code very early in life and after these years of freelancing, i can adapt to whichever work environment i'm put in. After all freelance work is a good way to learn new things and improve on your skills.<p>Anyhow i started getting job offers quite often lately and been turning them down, but now i feel like i'm wasting my time, effort and money going to college just to get a degree that wouldn't serve me much. So now i'm torn between going to college and freelancing like i do now or taking one of the job offers, because it would help me in my career and would be a much easier work than freelancing, i doubt it would pay more, but i really need stability in my life <comment><USER2> You're getting job offers because it's cheaper to hire you without a degree. the day you become more expensive than a raw new graduate is the day your company revises its hiring policies and uses them as an excuse to forget about you. You don't say whether you're studying computer science or something else, but if you don't feel challenged then maybe you should switch major to some field where your skills/knowledge are deficient _and_ there are barriers or resistance to automation and computerization.

At your age I chose work and financial freedom over college (although the decision was much more complex than I want to explain here), figuring that I could continue educating myself with books and determination...which I did, but I lost out on a _lot_ of opportunities, both economic and social, because of not having the degree or the social network you build up in college. For example, what if you decide you want to live in some other country a few years from now? A degree can make the difference between a work visa and automatic rejection. If you are very entrepreneurial and create your own opportunities by relentlessly pursuing goals and seeking out new clients, this may not be a problem for you. If you're naturally talented and your freelance jobs sort of fell into your lap, then your popularity is evanescent and you will find yourself increasingly pigeonholed over time, which will require you to adopt less efficient economic strategies. Your mention of a desire for stability suggests to me that you in the second group.

Having a degree is not the same thing as being educated, but it does represent a very important type of social capital that will allow you to access a much greater range of shortcuts. Not just in job offers - you will enjoy small but significant savings on things like insurance, consumer finance and so on, the totals of which are quite significant over a lifetime. I don't regret any of the time I've invested in broadening my knowledge, critical thinking skills and so on, but I can't bank it the same way as someone who has a degree can. If I had a time machine I would absolutely go back and convince myself to do things differently, so my advice is stick it out now and reap substantial rewards later. Without it you are like the feature phone/landline user in a smartphone world.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you said is true, i used to just code for myself, i didn't even share that aspect of myself with anyone. Until one day i stumbled upon a contract and did it just for fun. The money was good and each contract brought me another, and since i charge 50% upfront i really couldn't say no to some of the project that were a lot of money. Which brings us to this moment in time where i'm working on 3 contracts and probably gonna not sleep this weekend to finish everything in the deadline. So that's why i asked for stability, i don't care about the money as long as its a bit close to what i'm making now. I just din't want to be working at 2am in the morning anymore.

As for the original point. Yes i do agree, you make a compelling point

<comment><USER3> Why don't you get another freelancer to help you with the work you can't handle within healthy working hours?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A degree will be very hard to pursue later, but jobs offers will continue to run in.

IMHO the best solution to your problem is to try to get the degree ASAP while keeping some jobs, just enough to keep you going. College will broaden your circle and knowledge. Try to enter a research group, since you're so skilled. That might give you access to great startup ideas that can only be pursued in that environment. Also college is fun, try get some of that too.

You should get the degree in order to level up socially. Will make your life easier.

Any college has to give probably more than you can handle in different many different ways. Try to get all of that because ain't going to come from anywhere else.

You'll have time to work, as a freelancer, an employee or do you own thing, you are only 19. Now it's time to study, focus on the studies :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Contrary to the loud signal you'll hear in much of industry, there is still a large part of it where you won't be taken seriously without a degree.

If you want to work on good teams, teams that have been carefully selected, you have to be able to have been selected for those teams.

I wasn't very strategic with my education (academic or self) with employment or with technologies I chose to be proficient in, and so on paper I probably look like pretty much any other high-school-educated "Open Source Hacker". People that hire me are also going to be hiring the guy that installed Wordpress for his church once, the guy that everything he writes takes geometric time and doesn't question it because he has no idea how fast computers really are, having only worked with synchronous multi-page HTML+JS+PHP "apps" running on shared hosting, etc. Nobody can tell that I'm different from these characters until after they have hired me (and after my wage is negotiated...) and I will have to work with the teams they have chosen and fix what they break.

As far as I can tell so far, I'm not able to be hired on teams for which I would be a good fit ("I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member" but with bills to worry about). I've had received apologetic application rejection emails faster than it's humanly possible to have been considered - I can't even convince some (literal) HR robot to give me a chance. I've done well enough for myself despite this (I don't intend to be pitied), but I certainly do not recommend the situation.

A degree is not the best filter to be able to pass to avoid this kind of fate (the best is probably social connectivity - but that can very easily be a side-effect of graduation) but it is one. Whatever you do, make sure you have many.

</comment><comment><USER6> I will suggest you read a few biographies. Bill Gates and Madonna are both college drop outs. It doesn't appear to have hurt either of their careers. On the other hand, looking around me, it seems to me that more educated people tend to have a somewhat smoother experience of life. Those who were born with talent seems to take it really hard when the run into situations they aren't innately well equipped to handle.

That doesn't make college the automatic right answer. I think you need to find some historical or public figures that you can identify with in some way and see how the handled it and see if you can infer if which path seems like the better fit for you personally.

I can argue it in either direction if I care to (for college or against college). But that doesn't answer the question as to which is the right answer for you in specific.

<comment><USER7> > Bill Gates and Madonna are both college drop outs. It doesn't appear to have > hurt either of their careers.

Bill Gates was also born with a million dollar trust fund, so make sure you have a safety net and starting capital like that as well before dropping out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr; it's really up to you, either way are a good way to go with some trade- off. pick what suits you best.

If you're just looking for a diploma, I'd recommend you to drop it off. If you want to learn, pick a great university and embrace it. The solid base that you'll get will be worth it, but you'll spend much time and will be very tough.

However, nowadays you can embrace coursera and learn on demand while studying the current market. That's what I chose for myself as I wanted to work over 'study'. I kept doing specialization over specialization and I like it. I also admire who went to good universities. Bad ones you should drop off. Unless you're a Stanford engineer, your 'diploma' today is your portifolio (github projects per say) and your network.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well is there a reason to finish college aside from a solid base? I mean doesn't starting early would give me head start?

And aside from that, do you think that if i decide to drop school i should stick to freelancing or find a steady job?

<comment><USER8> Yes, there is. If you enter in a good university, e.g., MIT, you'll know a lot of smart people which will also be good to your network. You'll also have access to smart teachers.

Yes, starting early gives you a head start and you won't lose it, unless you stop studying. But study can be achieved inside a college or outside it. That's where Coursera/EdX comes in along with courses (40 hours usually) and self-studying -- but note that you're less likely to study some subjects like Math, which after some years looked very interesting to me as I wanna dive in machine learning for example. Ok, I can learn on demand, but that's because now I see a very good application for Math :D -- there is no 'correct' way to do it, just don't stop learning.

I don't really know your financial conditions, but supposing that you can choose without fear, considering your age, I'd first say that you choose both! What?! Both, yes. I really enjoyed working a big company (Walmart), increase the network and saw the 'company way' of doing things. But when I got tired I switched to freelance mode. There are trade-offs. Again, there is no 'right way'. Depends on many things. The proposed salary, the freedom you are willing to give up, the job conditions x freelance conditions, how much you survive bosses ordering you around, etc.

If you don't know freelance and company is interesting to try them out to see what fits more for you. The problem (actually a good problem to have) is that you have many clients as you said, and if you go to a company, you'll need to get them back again. I can't really give you a straight answers, I'm telling more about what I went through and the variables that you should consider IMHO.

Btw: learned only years later, but a diploma can help you A LOT if you want to immigrate

<comment><AUTHOR> Well i can probably manage to hold a job while freelancing on the side. I'd like not to, but i'm still young and can take the stress and exhaustion i suppose

<comment><USER8> That would mostly kill your freelance side. You'll end up exhausted in the end of the day I think, thus won't be much creative to work more. The brain just crash hehe. If at least you could work 3 days in a week to see what it is like. Otherwise don't bother, this time may come in the future. You may end up in a big project which the client allows you to use his space to interact with the company's team somehow. You will even be able to negotiate this, like a discount to use his office to see what's like more close. Just an idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> College programs (ideally) will expose you to different kinds of ideas, subjects, people and technologies. It formalizes your knowledges. This means you can pursue more valuable ideas in future. Also, a formal degree can open doors to going and working abroad.

I think you should seriously go for a degree.

If you want to keep making money, hire a guy and give him your freelance work, share the profits.

</comment><comment><USER10> Contrary to what many people will tell you - a degree is just ONE of the things you go to college for. Go to college. Your at a great age, and will have experiences you will not be able to have at any other time in your life. It is worth it, it will help you grow. You can keep a client or two on the side to pay bills, etc..

</comment><comment><USER11> That depends on your current hourly rate. What is it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually get paid per project. A landing page for 2500$ a normal static website 3000$ for 5 pages and 200$ more for each page. But if i'm working on a Frontend/Backend gig i charge 150$ per hour

<comment><USER12> Where have you gotten work from while still in school? Do you do all your work remote? Do you have a portfolio available to show publicly here so I can see what kind of skill level I need to get work that pays that well?

Im graduating a (Canadian) College web dev course at the end of next semester and the only work I have managed to get was some WordPress stuff that ended up being less than 15$ an hour. I am actively looking to find front/backend work that pays halfway decent right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm in a similar sort of situation. After my 3rd year of college pursuing a CS degree, I realized I was learning more on my own than I was at school. I too had started programming early on, teaching myself C++ at 14.

I'm glad I went to college but after a while I felt like it had served it's purpose for me, I had already completed the major courses (data structures, software architecture, etc...) and pretty much just had courses like Compiler Construction and OS Design left. So I had an internship at a startup the summer after my 3rd year (summer of 2014) and I was immediately placed as the only developer working on a web application for analyzing our production logs. I did well and near the end of my internship I was offered a job... and I took it. So I dropped out and for a year now I've been working at the same startup and am now the lead (and only) developer on all of our web services. I don't regret not finishing school, though it's been a little bittersweet watching all of my friends graduating in past few months.. My view is that you should get all you can out of college while it's in your best interest, I just didn't feel it was helping me as much as a job in the industry would, and I'm certainly doing well enough. Not to mention the fact that most universities don't even offer a real program for full stack web development. I've even been getting a lot of interest from recruiters (on avg. about 4 positions a month for a year) despite not having a degree.

That being said, something I've heard a lot from the developers I work with is that later on it could be an excuse for employers not to pay me as much. Even with this first gig I'm seeing that I'm getting paid less than new employees with less knowledge & experience than me and for a lesser position, simply because they have a degree. The approach that I'm taking is to ride out this job for a while longer and then getting another job, and if me not having a degree poses a problem in any way I'll just go and finish my degree (which will take about 2.5 more years due to a transfer after my sophomore year). I'm 22 right now so it would certainly be better for me to do it now rather than later but I'm simply not convinced yet that it will be a problem later on. It's also worth noting that I'm taking a lot of courses on Coursera and am going through the web specializations to add the certifications to my resume, which will definitely help to make up for not having a degree and are much more manageable while I'm working full time.

All that being said, I'm _highly_ interested to hear what current employers have to say about someone having ample experience/knowledge but having no degree, especially when it comes to equality of pay vs. coworkers with higher education degrees.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see that we're in the same boat buddy. If i was you 2 years ago, would you tell me to take the job or to finish college

<comment><USER13> Honestly I'd say feel it out. I don't know about you but for me it's fairly easy for me to go back to school, which is a very real possibility for me. I mean worst case scenario I take a year or two off from school to make some money and work the very job I'd be hoping to get after graduation, which makes me an even stronger candidate if I get the degree. But my biggest fear is ending up missing out on opportunities when I'm 40 and wishing I had just taken the 2 years to finish. For me another fallback plan was to get experience and then if I go back I could easily find clients freelancing instead of working the usual waiting jobs during school, which would make me substantially more spending money while in school, but it sounds like you're already there. So I say try it, for me it was very refreshing after being tired of school, and then go from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think at the end of the day, you don't know what tomorrows going to bring. You may be getting job offers now, but what does that really get you? Not sure if you're in the US or not, but at least in the US, Employment is at-will in many states, _especially_ for engineers.

In _many, many, many_ cases, I think a degree _cannot_ hurt you, only help you. Yes, I have seen examples of people who would rather work with someone without a degree, but I truly believe those employers are few and far between. If you ever get tired of living the start-up life (you never know what tomorrow brings, what if you start a family and don't want the risks associated with freelancing? What if you just decide one day it's not for you anymore? The only thing certain about the future is that it's uncertain), a degree will get you in the door at places that offer A) Great Pensions/Retirement packages, B) Great Healthcare, and other great perks, places that you probably wouldn't even get an interview if you don't have your degree.

Personally speaking, I have a great deal of respect for anyone who knows what they're doing. I've worked with people without a formal education, and those with. There's a major difference though, in that the people I've worked with who have a formal education, we have common ground. Meaning, it's much more likely that when I say the "pigeon hole principal", someone who took discrete mathematics (one of the cornerstones of CS) will remember something about it. For someone without a degree, there's a lower chance that they'd know what I was talking about (not impossible, not unlikely even, just less of a chance).

Does that matter? Not a whole lot for some stuff, but in other areas absolutely. In software, I generally am not disappointed if my colleagues haven't designed something using an FPGA and Verilog, or have any clue as to the difference between x86 and x64 ISAs, but if they don't get the concept of a linked-list, or a queue, stack, or something else fundamental to computer- science, it does slow work down. If they're a javascript developer and don't know what a prototype is, or how function literals/closures work, it can slow communication down.

Then again, I haven't worked much in the front-end, or even in Web. I focus primarily on desktop/server/batch/financial software, so I work in low level code, such as c/c++/COBOL and Java(debatably high-level).

At it's core, engineering is the use of knowledge and the scientific method to solve problems and build cool/useful stuff. Experience builds that knowledge, and all college does is focus your experience on knowledge that a group of people believe will be useful to you, as well as on a meta-level as well (learning how to learn was really what I took away from school the most).

Just keep in mind that going back is _way_ harder than just finishing it while you're already there. You get use to the perks of being at work, and then going back to the academic life really gets harder, the longer your away (at least that's what I've found).

Hope that helps, and good luck on your journey.</comment>


Ask HN: posting job listings? - <AUTHOR>

What are good places to post job listings? Where do people look? Where have companies had success?<p>37signals, github, stackoverflow, etc all have job boards... what works? <comment><USER2> I've had good success hiring Pythonistas from <http://python.org/jobs></comment>


HTTP/1 should die; HTTP/2 can do everything HTTP/1 could, only faster - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@pgjones/http-1-should-die-81b7588d617e <comment><USER2> Actually, no. HTTP/2 cannot be easily read or written by a human with a telnet or s_client connection without some additional tools. It also can't be supported by a lot of old software without some additional layer of indirection. This may or may not be important to you, but it is a thing that HTTP/2 cannot do.

<comment><USER3> > HTTP/2 cannot be easily read or written by a human with a telnet or s_client > connection without some additional tools

This is, of course, why we also don't use chunked encoding and compression with HTTP 1 rather than writing better tools. I mean, you even have the example in that sentence about how the solution for using TLS was not to say "it doesn't work with telnet" but to use s_client, ncat, socat, etc.

> It also can't be supported by a lot of old software without some additional > layer of indirection

This part is true but it's also the classic legacy computing problem: old software which cannot be upgraded will increasingly have security and compatibility issues which favor putting it behind a proxy anyway. This should factor into the cost of choosing not to maintain those systems rather holding back the future.

<comment><USER2> How is HTTP/1.1 holding anything back?

<comment><USER3> HTTP 1 has a fixed feature set and a lot of warts. Nobody is working on HTTP 1.2, etc. so the only way anything is going to get better will be in the HTTP/2 series of development. At some point we need to ask whether skimping on maintenance is actually better than getting those improvements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One important difference: HTTP/2 requires* encryption. This makes getting up and running for local development and small deployments more difficult.

* [https://http2.github.io/faq/#does-http2-require-encryption](https://http2.github.io/faq/#does-http2-require-encryption) "[...] currently no browser supports HTTP/2 unencrypted."

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing they're not carving out a niche for self-signed certs? I think that would have been a fair balance, of setting a "this is a self-signed cert" instead of the current "YoUr WeBsIte IS UNSECURED" (which isn't actually true).

Accepting and indicating self signed would also be handy in Tor's onion sites, since the only companies that will issue certs require EV2 and all your info and a pile of money. And Onioncerts are pretty much only Facebook's area :/

<comment><USER6> > (which isn't actually true)

how would I discern your self-signed certificate from the one served by the person arp-spoofing the gateway in a Starbucks?

<comment><USER5> No cert chain for starters. The better answer here is some sort of "self signed standard data" for non-CA certs. But right now, testing in a NAT using HTTP2 is a ugly nonstarter.

<comment><USER6> > No cert chain for starters.

why would the person who arp-spoofs the gateway in the Starbucks not be able to fetch your self-signed cert chain and mint their own matching chain with the exact same metadata (but of course differing keys)?

<comment><USER5> Then what's your proposal for NATted, self-contained (no gateway), and Tor Onion networks?

Sure, if I have a public IP and DNS records pointing towards it, I'm served by LE or a multitude other vendors. But that's a small number of machines on any network.

<comment><USER7> If you have a public DNS entry then you can get a certificate from Let's Encrypt using the DNS verification method, even if the name points to a private IP address. DANE would also be an option if it (and DNSSEC) were more widely implemented.

Local name resolution (mDNS) could take a page from what Tor already does and encode the public key fingerprint into the domain name. If the key uniquely matches the domain (perhaps just the first part, e.g. b32-key-hash.friendly- name.local) then you automatically get the equivalent of domain validation. While, by itself, this doesn't prove that you're connected to the _right_ domain, by bookmarking the page and visiting it only through that bookmark you would get the equivalent of trust-on-first-use. Browsers would just need to recognize this form of domain name and validate the key against the embedded hash instead of an external CA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes and no, because it is complicated. This is a fairly naive example of HTTP/2 to illustrate a point, while most websites I am called in on to optimize the load time are not built like this. This example only shaved off around 60ms for 20 requests, if your website has 20 requests to load, you have ads or you have a resource problem.

HTTP/2 spec says it should not share a connection across a host/port combo, any content you have loaded on a CDN, or a your own cdn.mydomain.com will be a separate connection. The reason CDNs are faster is because they are closer(lower latency) or it is common and already cached in your browser.

HTTP/2 still suffers from latency and TCP Window sizes, so no your 8mb website will still be slow after you enable HTTP/2, you still have to push 8mb out to the client. If you have a site loading over 80 resources, concat and minify that first before asking your server admin to turn on HTTP/2.

HTTP/1 clients gets around some network latency issues by issuing more than one TCP socket, just like SFTP clients using more than one thread. Because it is hard to overload a single socket when your latency for your ACK packets is 200ms+. If this wasn't true, Google would not be spending the time on a UDP based version of HTTP. HTTP/2

Overall, lower you content size, lower the number of requests it takes to load your initial website, THEN turn on HTTP/2.

<comment><USER3> You have some IE6/HTTP 1 tuning advice which is no longer necessary in there.

> The reason CDNs are faster is because they are closer(lower latency) or it > is common and already cached in your browser.

Shared CDN hit rates tend to be rather low and usually slower than self- hosting unless you're requesting a LOT of resources because the DNS + TLS setup overhead are greater than the eventual savings. Opening multiple connections was useful back when you had very low limits for the number of simultaneous requests but the browsers all raised that and HTTP/2 allowing interleaved requests really tilted that into net-loss territory.

The best way to do this is to host your site behind a CDN so that initial setup cost is amortized across almost every request and you can use things like pushes for the most critical page resources.

> If you have a site loading over 80 resources, concat and minify that first > before asking your server admin to turn on HTTP/2.

Similarly, this is frequently a performance de-optimization because it means that none of your resources will be processed until the entire bundle finishes streaming and the client needs to refetch the entire thing any time a single byte changes. The right way to do this is to bundle only things which change together, prioritize the ones which block rendering, and break as much as possible out into asynchronous loads so you don't need to transfer most of it before the site is functional.

<comment><USER8> Most of my tests on CDNs show they are faster unless the server is hosted in Chicago for me. I have put anycast SSL termination in front of sites before that have also decreased the ssl connection handshake, which barely beats CloudFront or CloudFlare on a decent day. If I had the money I could use Akamai which I know my ISP has before it even hits the internet, no way I could make my web server faster than that.

It is not a performance de-optimization. If you have 8mb of JS, sure you should break that up, but you have 8mb of JS and that is your first true problem. I aim for about 400kb or less of JS, on a marketing website it may change once a quarter, so I really don't care and they are all first time users anyway. For a web application, I also don't care because if they are mobile they need that in one request, gziped to like 40kb, so the hours it would take to optimize for the single byte changed is still a performance budget of 80ms.

<comment><USER3> > Most of my tests on CDNs show they are faster unless the server is hosted in > Chicago for me.

For you, with warmed caches. The problem is that most users aren't you and so when they follow a link to example.com their client makes that first DNS request for example.com, starts the connection and TLS handshake, etc. and then sees a request for e.g. cdnjs.com and does that same work again for a different hostname. If (in that example) you were hosting your site on CloudFlare you'd have the same work for the first connection but not the second because it'd already have an open connection by the time your HTML told the client it needed your CSS, JS, etc.

Here's an example: check out [https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190125_F0_a1a180631ecebd8...](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190125_F0_a1a180631ecebd8a67d3b1b6473e66d3/1/details/#step1_request1) and notice how often you see "DNS Lookup" and "Initial Connection" times which are a significant chunk of the total request time — and ask yourself whether it would be better for the render-blocking resources to have those times be zero. Especially measure how that works on a cellular or flaky WiFi connection, which is closer to what most people experience in the real world.

As to the gigantic bundle of JavaScript, do some real browser testing and ask whether it's better to wait for the entire resource to be loaded before any code runs — and to repeat that entire transfer every time one byte changes — or only block on the portions needed to render the page. Yes, having 8MB of JavaScript is too much in aggregate but the solution is to use less and use it more intelligently, not slap it all into a big ball of mud.

<comment><USER8> Those DNS lookup times for Azure are in fact terrible, no DNS query should take 400ms. You can pre-lookup DNS using html header tags, but nothing fixes a slow DNS query like that, that is a failure of the Azure Edge DNS servers.

I do real browser testing, and have Real User Monitoring setup to prove the results. Page load times from 600ms to 1.2s reported from the clients browser. I measure and test our app on 3g connection including the high packet loss 4g signal I get at my house. The point of my comment was that HTTP2 is not a fix all issues with performance on a site. The Webpagetest result would not have loaded in 2 seconds if they switched to HTTP2. Its 400 resources is what is slowing it down, not http/1.

<comment><USER3> Look at the times for Google where they loaded jQuery: because it's using an external CDN, the initial connection time (80ms) is greater than the total transfer time (69ms) on a relatively fast connection. It would be faster to serve it from your own server and then you also don't have to deal with things like SRI to maintain the same level of security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I rather believe HTTP/2 will die when HTTP/3 is available.

After all HTTP/1 is very simple to implement and already widely used and optimized. It is usable for most of cases. Plus, maybe in the future, CDN can serve HTTP/2 to client while use HTTP/1 to read the source.

And currently web browsers still need to send Upgrade request in HTTP/1 to know whether or not a unknown HTTP server supports HTTP/2\. I guess this will still be true after HTTP/3 comes out (alt-svc).

<comment><USER10> Actually HTTP2 upgrade isn't done with an "Upgrade:" request, but rather with TLS protocol negotiation.

<comment><USER9> Oh silly me. I've implemented my own HTTP/2 server according to RFC 7540[0]. I forgot in the real world web browsers just send "h2" TLS-ALPN.

[0] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7540#section-3.2](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7540#section-3.2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Aha, this article is by the creator of Quart[0]! I'm a big fan - one of my favorite new python packages. It's essentially a super zippy, flask-compatible asyncio python server. I switched a flask app over recently and saw an immediate 10-20x throughput gain (the app is entirely io-bound). pgjones was a pleasure to work with when I had a few issues and had to contribute a few compat fixes as well. Thanks for the awesome package!

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/pgjones/quart/](https://gitlab.com/pgjones/quart/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, any chance you could write up the throughput gain? It would be great to see some real production numbers.

Thanks for the comments.

<comment><USER12> I've looked at quart and it looks interesting but is there much point to running an async webserver for APIs mainly reliant on db-access if we use SQLAlchemy for database connections?

I'm under the impression that since the db stuff still is sync/blocking we won't win much by running an asgi server instead of WSGI.

<comment><USER11> Give peewee-async as shot if you'd like async DB access as well.

[https://peewee-async.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://peewee- async.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

Looks like Gino is a new project trying to bake asyncio ORM on top of sqlalchemy core: [https://github.com/fantix/gino](https://github.com/fantix/gino)

<comment><USER12> While interesting for greenfield development and experiments I'd say that it's most often a to big of a leap to change both ORM (with all db-access-code) and microframework at the same time for a well established project at 20KLOC+.

<comment><USER11> For sure, definitely not a good path for an existing app :) You can use the sqlalchemy-core via async via a few projects ([https://github.com/RazerM/sqlalchemy_aio](https://github.com/RazerM/sqlalchemy_aio)) but for the full ORM there's no option, as far as I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This can't be true, can it?

I was under the impression that HTTP/2 used a persistent connection w/ multiplexing. This seems like it would be very nice in a web-browser to front- end situation, but what about for internal service calls? Seems like persistent connection between services would mess w/ common load balancing schemes.

<comment><USER14> There's nothing stopping you from having one connection per request with HTTP/2\. You could build your software to simply have the same behavior as HTTP/1.1 with keep-alive

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Time will show what unknown challenges and problems http/2 carries. So far, the protocol is studied mostly by google(and less by cloudflare), there is limited research by independent parties.

From the article, i see that the author heavily relies on the chrome devtools to demonstrate the performance benefit, relying on chrome connection statuses.

My spdy and http/2 tests in 2016 did not show much imrovment in perceived load speed for our e-commerce site. optimizing delivery(for us - caching the pre- rendered javascript components and pre-loading some ajax) yield better results. ymmv.

</comment><comment><USER16> So, Websockets over HTTP/2 are only available in latest Firefox (or experimentally in Chrome, if you manually turn on a flag for it). Almost no servers support HTTP/2 Websockets, too.

Sorry, it is a little too early to switch.

</comment><comment><USER17> If you want HTTP/2 to succeed, you're going to have to start making little wins. Find a tiny, easy market and get them to use it. Then find a giant customer (Google never counts) and get them to use it. If it seems more complicated, nobody's going to pick it up unless they have to.

The alternative is to create big sexy splash pages, create a lots of hype, and lie to people about how _easy_ it is to implement. When they're finally caught up in the complexity of implementation, it'll be too late to back out.

</comment><comment><USER18> Same can be said about IPv6 - and could have been said about IPv6 20 years ago. Still waiting...

<comment><USER3> That's a tricky comparison because using IPv6 required updates to the client, server, and every box in between whereas HTTP/2 only requires the endpoints to be updated and has a graceful degradation path in most cases. Unsurprisingly, it's already far more common than IPv6 because you don't have to go to every enterprise on the planet and tell them to fix things even their network team is afraid to touch.

In contrast, HTTP/2 rapidly hit much higher numbers thanks to Firefox and Chrome shipping support via automatic updates. When CloudFlare deprecated SPDY about a year ago they were already seeing adoption numbers just under 70%:

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating- spdy/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/deprecating-spdy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Speed. It is not everything.

</comment><comment><USER20> Except websockets.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is now possible, the article talks about what impact HTTP/2 WebSockets can make. (See also RFC 8441).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> but can h2 do websocket?

<comment><USER22> First sentence: "Recently WebSocket support has been added to HTTP/2 (in RFC 8441)"</comment></comment>


Musk extends Times feud, calls Model S review "ethics violation" - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/09/us-musk-review-nyt-idUSBRE9280HX20130309

<comment><USER2> Elon Musk was my hero until this Times feud. I loved him. I thought he was moving the world forward. He is. I just don't respect him anymore, not like I used to. I mean, I do, just not like I used to.

I looked at the chart. I read his response. I read the original. The Times journalist was clearly being honest. He had a really hard time with the car. I had the feeling he wanted the car to be great. He didn't want the disappointment.

Musk is painting him as a villain beset on destroying the future of electric propulsion. It's just not true.

Just fix the car. Make it better. Just make it better, Elon. You can make it better. It's a little broken right now, but you can do it. I still believe in you. I'm a little broken up about your personal issues here, but please, rise above it and make the car better and change the world. I mean, keep changing the world.

This is just a small distraction.

<comment><USER3> Try to be sensitive to the fact that in cases like these, especially with such high stakes involved (a billion dollar company for Elon Musk, a career for the reporter), both sides are bound to throw everything they can into their argument. While such displays of human nature can legitimately be disappointing, at least try to see the whole picture and the motivations of each side.

If you think Elon Musk is 100% correct that the reporter was a liar, or that the reporter was 100% in the right for publishing a big picture of a Tesla Model S being towed, you're going to be disappointed.

Both sides are upset, extremely opinionated, and have their own slant on the matter. Both sides made mistakes, and probably could have held back on a few things they claimed.

Elon Musk should have focused just on the obvious faults of the reporter -- like how the reporter _probably_ should have more clearly highlighted that he literally began a trip for X miles with Y miles range displayed on the dash, where X > Y by a considerable amount (rather than burying this fact in noise). Not little details like air conditioning and driving in circles to find the supercharger.

And similarly, although there's disagreement over what certain Tesla reps may have recommended over the phone, it seems at last slightly disingenuous to post a big photo of a Tesla Model S being towed given the fact that he started and forced a trip of length X when the car showed range Y on the screen, where X > Y by a considerable amount.

Saying that you lost respect for Elon Musk is your right. However I _personally_ haven't lost much if any. He was defending a cause he felt strongly about. What was the reporter's motivations?

The article was clearly slanted. So was Elon's rebuttal, but with every force, expect an equal and opposite reaction.

I'm not condoning the rebuttal, but I would put it this way: I understand and sympathize with Elon's overreaction far more than I do with the reporter's initial motivations to slant the story. And he very clearly did slant it.

> Just fix the car.

That's not really the issue, even if he could fix it. Which is easier said than done; we're dealing with advanced material science here. You can bet his team is hard at work on it, but this is the kind of thing that takes many years of deep research. Let's deal with the issue at hand (slanted articles vs slanted rebuttals), for now.

<comment><USER4> "If you think Elon Musk is 100% correct that the reporter was a liar, or that the reporter was 100% in the right for publishing a big picture of a Tesla Model S being towed, you're going to be disappointed."

I don't think the OP went into it thinking that Musk or Broder were right.

" just don't respect him anymore, not like I used to. I mean, I do, just not like I used to."

I interpreted that statement to refer to how Tesla reacted to the review. Musk could have taken the opportunity to clearly explain the extenuating circumstances and extended a new opportunity for Broder to take a test drive, but instead opted for this reality-TV-like drama to play out (which, btw, other media sources like CNBC and CNN really enjoyed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Elon Musk cares. He has everything on the line, and everything he's worked for (and his employees and investors too). They're trying to change something fundamental.

Years of effort by thousands of people, doing something that matters.

To have that put at risk by a lazy/incompetent reporter, who's got nothing on the line but 24 hours of his ass in a car, someone who can't even take his job seriously enough to even attempt to get it right...it's got to be infuriating.

Put the echo chamber idiocy out of mind. There's someone who's _right_ here. And it's not Broder.

Say, why hasn't Broder offered to repeat the drive? He's probably too busy figuring out how to review rocket technology without learning anything about that either.

<comment><USER4> You've fallen into the trap of accepting Musk's false dichotomy here. Try to separate your emotions when you analyze what happened here.

What's clear, from an objective point of view, is that there were issues that could be attributed to Tesla. Musk still hasn't refuted the fact that Tesla engineers gave Broder really poor advice during the trip. Musk didn't produce the call logs, and the "data" corroborates most of Broder's claims regarding what happened during the drive.

"Elon Musk cares. He has everything on the line, and everything he's worked for "

Gives him more incentive to fight the NYT and try to paint Broder as an evil man. CEO has billions of dollars on the line, NYT reporter has his career on the line, yet if this were any other traditional company you would side with the reporter.

"To have that put at risk by a lazy/incompetent reporter, who's got nothing on the line but 24 hours of his ass in a car, someone who can't even take his job seriously enough to even attempt to get it right...it's got to be infuriating."

Broder _did_ get it right, and Musk's data and nonsequiturs proved it. The core facts were that Broder followed Tesla's advice and, by following the advice, the car ran out of charge. You are letting your blind faith in Musk cloud your reasoning abilities

"Say, why hasn't Broder offered to repeat the drive? He's probably too busy figuring out how to review rocket technology without learning anything about that either."

Why hasn't Musk revealed the call logs with the advice Tesla gave Broder during the trip? Is it because they would corroborate Broder's story? Most likely.

<comment><USER5> "Low-grade ethics violation" is an apt description of what occurred, in my opinion.

Musk hasn't painted Broder as evil. Publicity-seeking and/or incompetence aren't evil. It's just amplified by the backdrop of electric cars.

If Musk _hadn't_ called bullshit when he saw it, it would have been open season on Tesla by every copycat hack trying to get a piece of the action.

You can be sure that journalists covering Tesla for publications of record will be quite careful and accurate with their facts, good and bad, from now on.

I don't think Musk can ask for more than that.

<comment><USER4> "Low-grade ethics violation" is appropriate only if you think the journalist's mandate was to brown-nose.

"Musk hasn't painted Broder as evil."

Musk wrote (source: <http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test- drive>):

         In Mr. Broder's case, he simply did not accurately capture what happened and worked very hard to force our car to stop running.

I'm sorry, but that's absolutely painting Broder as Evil. I'm going to repeat the claim, because for some reason you don't see this as nefarious: _worked very hard to force our car to stop running._

"If Musk hadn't called bullshit when he saw it, it would have been open season on Tesla by every copycat hack trying to get a piece of the action."

Instead, it was open season to attack NYT.

"You can be sure that journalists covering Tesla for publications of record will be quite careful and accurate with their facts, good and bad, from now on.

I don't think Musk can ask for more than that."

What Musk is asking for is the media to be his lapdog. And that's fine. But don't delude yourself into thinking he's asking for objectivity. You are belying your own inability to think.

<comment><USER6> With a bar for _"evil"_ so absurdly low, it strikes me as rather silly to become so indignant over such labels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why on earth is he still talking about this? There is nothing to be gained from it at this point. The story played out with words back and forth, whatever opinions people have formed about who was "right" have been formed. No one is going to think better of Tesla from Elon Musk continuing to talk about it. It was an unfortunate little kerfuffle, let sleeping dogs lie and move on already.

I also think it's a mistake for Elon to continue claiming that the reporter acted in bad faith. There's no way to prove that; the data can show where the car went but not what was going on in the reporter's head.

Elon's passion is changing the world, and I admire him immensely. The problem with passion is that it can sometimes cause a person to act rashly. If I were Elon, I'd find a cool-headed trusted friend to help me choose my battles a little more wisely.

</comment><comment><USER4> The most hilarious part of Musk's ego-trip is that the longer he extends the feud, the worse _he_ looks and the better _Broder_ looks. Musk lost on the merits, and trying to re-litigate the arguments only reinforces that fact.

</comment><comment><USER8> > _Musk has said Tesla lost $100 million in sales and canceled orders as a > result of the Times' review_

Nice game of Telephone. Musk actually said the damage to Tesla's _reputation_ was a big part of that.

</comment><comment><USER9> Given that Elon libeled the NY Times and Broder with claims of "fakery"--an extraordinary claim which was not supported by the meager evidence presented-- I'd say Tesla itself is guilty of quite a bit more than an ethics violation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Given how little is known of Musk and Tesla in general, this continual public airing must be one of his cheapest sources of marketing...

</comment><comment><USER11> Why doesn't Tesla spend its effort on improving the product instead of shouting at reviewers who criticize it?

</comment><comment><USER12> Elon Musk is one of those bona fide type A geniuses that I would HATE to see go the way of Rise and McAffee.

</comment><comment><USER13> For a smart guy Musk is being incredibly stupid.

It's one thing to attack a show like Top Gear. It's a whole other to attack the New York Times. People around the world have a lot of respect for the paper and whilst nobody claims that they are always right there is the assumption that they wouldn't intentionally be dishonest or biased.

So by continually picking a fight with them people will tune out and just take the "truth lies in the middle" position which is not good at all for Tesla.

<comment><USER14> I've just watched that clip for the first time: [http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/electric- shocker?VideoBrows...](http://www.topgear.com/uk/videos/electric- shocker?VideoBrowserMode=this-week&Page=1)

Defamation? Really? I think Clarkson was actually pretty fair, considering his usual style. What they showed at least seems believable to me.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I for one think that Musk was being entirely unreasonable when he got upset with Top Gear (I mean come on, this is a show that gave a good review to a car because they were able to drive it upside-down in a tunnel...).

His issues with the Times seem _far_ more reasonable.

<comment><USER15> "gave a good review to a car because they were able to drive it upside-down in a tunnel"

Musk aside, is there a youtube link for that?

<comment><USER16> Perhaps he is speaking of this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbpgZ2Dt0A>

I think they also mentioned when reviewing one of those crazy open-wheelers that it was supposed to be able to drive upside-down simply due to downforce, but I don't think they demo'd that.

<comment><USER6> Yup, that's it!

F1 teams also commonly claim their cars could drive upsidedown, but the logistics of actually trying that would be absurd. You'd probably need a robotic driver at least...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anecdote: I was in the Facebook Menlo park campus parking lot, and just in front of the single building I was entering were parked a total of (7) tesla model S cars.

Comment: musk has made two of the most incredible companies of our decade, Tesla and Space X, they will mature. Any issues will resolve and the world will be better because of it.

Screw the Times.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do if someone posts something illegal to a SaaS you run? - <AUTHOR> There is all this talk about starting a Facebook competitor by a particular high profile angel investor and others. But what about content moderation on these sites?
What do you do if someone posts something illegal (say abuse images) to your site?
What about if someone threatens violence?
My instinct would be to hide (but keep) the content, immediately preserve any logs, then call the FBI.
But what if someone makes a threat or posts something illegal and you don't catch it because your content filters are not as advanced as Facebook and YouTube? Heck, Facebook and Youtube miss things all the time.
Fake news?
What are your liabilities as a site operator?
It seems to me that aside from the obvious problems of needing critical mass to take advantage of the network effect and the privacy and security requirements there are a lot of hidden liabilities for running such a site. <comment><USER2> First things first — IANAL.

What I can tell you is that a lot depends on where you are located and who your regulators are.

For example, in Belgium, the police have pretty broad powers to come in and just seize stuff, and you are criminally liable for anything that gets onto your servers, regardless of how that happened. Now, the police generally are smart enough to ask for your assistance in catching the real criminals who uploaded the illegal content and they would rather work with you than against you. But make no mistake, they will turn around and haul your ass down to jail in a heartbeat, if they think you are complicit.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think fake news are a separate category than (threats of) violence and kiddy porn. If for one of those types of things you immediately notify the relevant authorities that is the most important thing and I doubt there would be any liabilities.

</comment><comment><USER4> In general, involving legal counsel as soon as possible is the best option. The worst possible scenario is for it be proven that you knew about something and didn't take steps to deal with it in a timely manner.</comment>


On the complexities of the filesystem - <AUTHOR> http://mnmal.tumblr.com/post/388970181/on-the-complexities-of-the-filesystem <comment><USER2> The author claims he prefer having the application/OS hide the classic filesystem hierarchy from users (he presents the iPhone OS as an example).

While the idea works for a small number of 'files' (or documents), it does not scale well.

When you have a few tens of files, you need some way of organizing them. Search solves part of the problems, tagging and 'folders' are another option (see Gmail labels and Google Docs support of folders).</comment>


Debugging in Vim - <AUTHOR> https://www.dannyadam.com/blog/2019/05/debugging-in-vim/ <comment><USER2> This is a good article, but the real major feature that Vim 8 introduced wasn't running a terminal inside Vim (which has been possible in various forms forever), but support for asynchronous processing. The terminal is just one use case for the new async functionality, which is powering all sorts of useful plugins or behavior which used to be blocking.

<comment><USER3> I myself don't see the value of running a terminal in the editor. I see as an added complexity: did the makers of the editor code it the right? Is there any side-effects? Is the ENV correctly loaded? If adding an editor is simply saving you an "alt+tab" then isn't it a lot of effort just to avoid that?

<comment><USER2> That's not how it works. The terminal is running your login shell. All it has to do is launch an arbitrary process and then properly emulate xterm or whatever. Environment is handled identically to any other terminal session. Concern about it being "coded right" is misplaced.

The benefit is that you can copy data to/from it like any other Vim buffer.

It fits a certain workflow that some people prefer. If you don't consider alt- tabbing out of Vim to another window to be a big deal, it's probably not the workflow you're after, but for people like me who live inside a terminal and won't tab out for anything other than a web browser, it's useful. That said, I normally use another tmux window.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> GDB text user interface [1] is much easier and productive to use than this albeit it doesn't offer syntax highlighting.

[1] [https://ftp.gnu.org/old- gnu/Manuals/gdb/html_chapter/gdb_19....](https://ftp.gnu.org/old- gnu/Manuals/gdb/html_chapter/gdb_19.html)

<comment><USER5> GDB 8.3, just released [1], introduced support for syntax highlighting.

[1] [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info- gnu/2019-05/msg00007...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info- gnu/2019-05/msg00007.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to see a post like this but for Python. This one is for gdb.

</comment><comment><USER7> Damn, I was hoping this would be about debugging vimscript.

<comment><USER8> Elisp has a pretty good debugger just saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Having a terminal in Vim is very convenient.

</comment><comment><USER10> Vim only got integrated gdb support last year? Emacs has had that since last century[0], I think. How do you people _live_ like this? :-)

[0]: [https://github.com/emacs- mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.1...](https://github.com/emacs- mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS.18#L127)

<comment><USER11> I know you are joking but for me vim was never meant to replace the command line. For me the terminal is the IDE. Vim is the editor, gdb is the debugger, grep is for text searching, etc.

The desire to include more and more in vim mirrors what people have done with emacs but I personally have no use for making vim anything other than a very fast and efficient text editor.

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't dream of speaking for every vim user, but from casual observation it seems to me that `vim`ers tend to shed plugins as they get more experienced, instead of using more and more of them. So I believe your experience is quite typical.

<comment><USER13> > tend to shed plugins

There's a practical side to that - the biggest benefit of vi(m) is that it's _always_ there, no matter where you're shelled in to. However, their vi doesn't have your plugins. So if you get used to using plain-vanilla vi, you won't be lost when you sit down at (or ssh into) somebody else's computer.

<comment><USER14> >> down at (or ssh into) somebody else's computer.

Why would you develop software over SSH is seriously beyond me.

Eg are you actually SSHing into your running docker containers to edit code? The only language that allows for it is PHP - because any other language is either compiled or needs modules to be reloaded.

Are you viewing large datasets in csv files through vim? - This can't possibly work as vim requires them loaded into memory.

Are you editing config files on your servers using vim? - Do you not use automation to set everytting up on the servers?

<comment><USER15> > SSHing into your running docker containers to edit code

no, not primarily

A few use cases:

1) I'm on a bastion host, and I need to knock up a script to run there

2) I'm working at home, and I don't want turn on the VPN, I SSH into my workstation and develop as if I was on the workstation

3) I need to change a conf/script/other because something is wrong, and the edit->commit->change config run-> test cycle is more than 2 seconds.

4) I'm in a container, debugging something and I want to edit a file (mostly python here so no need to compile) docker build-> run -> retry is painfully slow, and leaves loads of mess.

5) I'm working on a headless box somewhere or other.

6) I'm debugging on someone else's workstation

I only really work with vim in a terminal, so doing it over SSH isn't actually all that noticeable. It does gets to be a problem when the latency is > 200ms</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tappy Chicken - <AUTHOR> https://www.unrealengine.com/html5

<comment><AUTHOR> Ease of use is as important as raw power. This is slower to load than the pure HTML versions of Flappy Bird that are out there, but the idea of Write once publish many is appealing.

I am not 100% certain I'd pay $19 a month as a hobbyist, but an excellent deal for a small game shop.</comment>